Selecting the Write Coach. Pun Intended. In most non-sports sectors of life, coaching is not a regulated enterprise. Unlike ghostwriting and editing, freelance sectors that largely adhere to professional guidelines and have organizations with which to file credentials, anyone can call herself a coach. Me, included. So how to find the best coach for you? […]
Trading Your Coffee Habit For Success: Coaching is More Affordable Than You Think My critique partner, a wildly talented YA Fantasy author, once saved up $500 to spend one online hour with a Hollywood screenwriter expert and plot doctor. We had heard him speak at a national conference. His content was revelatory; his delivery was […]
To Replace What's Been Lost At the risk of looking backward, almost always fruitless in the publishing industry because of its evolving nature and relentless pursuit of the next great buzz, pause with me to consider all that emerging writers have lost in the past year. Because I come from the world of romance writing, […]
The Writer-Coach Relationship, Reinvented. Every. Time. One of my coaching clients is in his seventies. He lives on a berry farm in a rural part of the Rockies. More than anything, he wants to write stories for his family, to leave his legacy. He is new to writing. I teach him about things like dependent […]
My home office window faces north. In southern winters, dreary rain splatters the brick sill past glass I should have cleaned ages ago. My bare feet needle into the lush area rug at my feet. Everywhere are reminders of the convergence of my two writing journeys - first, as an author, and second, as an […]
It's December. Time for the annual roundup of writer-ly gift ideas from people whose romanticized idea of a writer comes from movies or legends handed down from the Edwardian age. Even Writer's Digest is guilty this year. A notebook? Really? Where is the creativity? Where's the sensitivity? Give a writer an expensive moleskin notebook and […]
When I sit down to write a fiction story, I make ten thousand decisions: what to detail, what to leave out; what to hang on the walls and echo through the chambers of story space, what remains silent; what of the laundry list of emotions I should pluck and what those emotions look like on […]
For Augustine, this question provided the most challenge at the thought of publication. Drafting the book was liberating. No stone was left unturned. But the thought of sending the memoir out into the world was daunting. Some of the people he wrote about are deceased. In a way, the memoir is his farewell to them. […]
Memoir, by nature, is self-indulgent. Unless someone is famous or comes with a platform of admirers who enjoy a sneak peek at a private side of their life, the memoirist can wonder if what he/she has to say is beneficial to anyone. What is it inside some people that makes them burn to tell their […]
One of my greatest personal challenges with co-writing the memoir THE NATURE OF SHADOWS was a total ignorance about the subject matter. I was coming at Augustine’s life with all the preconceptions and bias and indifference that his target audience would bring to the page. In the book’s introduction, Augustine addresses some of those cultural […]
